There is this new version of an old series. You may notice from the beginning that it continues from the original work instead of being a sort of reboot. However, despite The Hero still being there, most of the supporting cast has been changed for new characters, except for one or two. Sometimes this is due to the hero having moved to a new city. Part of the new cast tend to be Expies to old characters. It could be considered a Re Tool.

Examples:

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order begins with Alita stranded on Zalem, having left all her friends (and almost all other characters) back on the surface. She soon makes new friends.

Guts of Berserk, after losing the Band of the Hawk to the horrors of the Eclipse, gains a new circle of True Companions in the form of Puck, Serpico, Farnese, Isidro, Schierke, Ivalera, Azan, Roderick, and Isma. Maybe even Magnifico. The only person still with him from his original group is Casca, though given the traumas she suffered during the Eclipse at the hands of Griffith himself, she's not of a lot of help to the rest of the crew.

The second season of Record of Lodoss War has Parn (older), and Deedlit (unchanged, given she's an elf), but most of the rest of the cast is changed. Oddly, certain characters are introduced is if the main cast has never met them, such as Parn's "first fight" with Orsen and Sharis.

While the Advanced and Diamond & Pearl season of the Pokémon anime utilized With a Friend and a Stranger,note As did the Orange Islands long prior, The Best Wishes and X & Y seasons had this Trope as Ash picked up Iris and Cilan in Unova and Clemont, Bonnie, and Serena in Kalos.

Digimon promotions beginning in Summer 2014 began to advertise a new Digimon series, whose sole line of real description amounts to "Tai's back." Not the team — Tai. However, when Digimon Adventure tri got more announcements, this was averted as it showed that the entire Adventure team would return with Taichi.

Comic Books

When the de-frozen Captain America began having solo adventures apart of The Avengers, this trope was enforced by the fact that he had already lost his supporting cast in the meantime. Fortunately, Sharon Carter and The Falcon went a long way in the 1970s to make him feel better as his new companions.

For the second year of the title, all of the original team members except Captain America left the team, with the sole members being comprised of Hawkeye, the Scarlet Witch, and Quicksilver.

In the comic series Powers, a major chunk of the secondary cast has been killed over the dozen+ volumes, (including everyone from Jerk Ass rival detectives to friendly superheroes) but the two leads have remained constant, aside from the occasional time on a bus. As a result either entirely new characters have filled in, old characters have evolved, or the focus has gotten tighter on the leads, depending on the situation.

Wonder Woman in particular suffers from this. She had a regular supporting cast up until The Bronze Age of Comic Books, but since then they keep being killed off or just disappearing without explanation. Most infamously, they just won't let her have her original love interest, Steve Trevor, back, doing everything from killing him to marrying him off to Etta Candy (another rarely seen supporting character). Wonder Woman herself has been based off at least three different American cities over the years.

Film

In Shock Treatment, the semi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Brad and Janet (and minor characters Ralph and Betty- and possibly the Criminologist) are the only Rocky characters to appear. In an unusual case, all except Ralph and the Criminologist are played by different performers, while several performers from Rocky appear in different roles.

Starship Troopers 3: Marauder features Johnny Rico, the protagonist of the first movie, in the leading role but the rest of the cast is completely different.

Cars 2 had the townsfolk of Radiator Springs reduced to cameos in favor of new characters Finn McMissile and Holly Shiftwell to accompany Mater and Lightning McQueen.

Journey Back to Oz features Dorothy returning to Oz...however the only one of her old companions who's willing to help her is the Scarecrow. So naturally, her new party is made up of new characters.

This was the case for the first several Mission: Impossible movies, with Tom Cruise and Ving Rhames being the only constants throughout the first three films while all of their other teammates or supervisors would be replaced or killed off. The fourth film plays with it a bit, in that Rhames' character is mostly absent outside of a cameo at the end, but Simon Pegg's minor character from the third film is given an expanded role. It's outright averted in the fifth film, as Cruise, Pegg, Rhames and Jeremy Renner (who was a prominent supporting figure in the fourth film as well) all return in major parts.

The New Avengers keeps only Steed. Of course, his partner changed anyway during the original series.

Charles in Charge: When it moved from network to first run syndication the only characters carried over were Charles & Buddy. The mother from the previous family was there as a Spinoff Sendoff, showing the house to the new family moving in.

In Chef!, only Gareth and Everton carry over for all three seasons. The supporting cast changes frequently.

The revival of Mission: Impossible in The '80s had Jim Phelps lead an all new Impossible Missions Force. One of the character however was the son of an original series one, who appeared in a few episodes.

Torchwood: Miracle Day, by virtue of it mostly being set outside of Wales and Torchwood staff having a low life expectancy. The previous series, Children of Earth also had a milder change of focus.

Due to its time travel format, Doctor Who rarely had recurring cast outside of the Doctor and between one and three companions. However, the Third Doctor's era had a strong rapport between the Doctor and UNIT...which dissolved after he regenerated into the Fourth Doctor and he no longer had a connection to 20th century Earth.

Most of the Tenth Doctor's allies went on to with their own lives (and spinoff shows), leaving him alone for the 2009 specials, and with a brand new recurring and main cast once he regenerated in The End of Time.

Season 4 of Veronica Mars was slated to be this, judging by the teaser. New work environment, new rivals, new (ex)boyfriends, yet Kristen Bell was still playing the lead role despite the notable lack of other series regulars. Sadly, it was too good to last.

The New WKRP in Cincinnati: about half of the characters from the old show were still at WKRP, with several new characters replacing the rest of the cast.

Thanks to its high mortality rate, several major characters were killed off, and anyone who managed to survive was almost always Put on a Bus. Jack was the only real constant character in the show.

Season 4 managed to subvert this. Although Jack and Chloe were initially the only returning characters when the season started, by the halfway point most of the newly introduced characters had been written out with only a handful remaining while several classic characters from the first three seasons were brought back in.

This often occurs in the judge panels of casting shows, if the main judge has strong It's All About Me tendencies:

Heidi Klum of Germany's next Topmodel is notorious for this. Her co-judges are lucky if they get to stick around for more than one season.

The same goes for Dieter Bohlen of Deutschland sucht den Superstar (the German version of American Idol).

Spartacus War of the Damned features a variant. The main characters are still the same (and quite a few addition), but every single antagonist this season are brand new characters.

Video Games

Ryo and Robert were the only recurring characters in Art of Fighting 3. Yuri also returns as an NPC. The rest were essentially rehashed (albeit slightly reworked) versions of the original cast with the exceptions of Lenny, Sinclair, and Wyler.

Final Fantasy X-2: Yuna and Rikku go have their own adventures, with a new team-member (Paine) in tow, and a whole bunch of N.P.C.s. The other playable characters from FFX have either died (properly), been erased from existence, gone to settle down to start a family, or gone on to rebuild his tribe's society.

The Dragon Age: Origins expansion Awakening transplants the player's Warden to a different part of Ferelden, where they acquire a whole new Ragtag Bunch of Misfits (save one veteran who suffered from Late Character Syndrome in the main game). This is also mostly true for the standalone DLC mini-campaigns that star the Warden: "The Golems of Amgarrak" give you the Dace brothers, their pet bronto, and a healing golem as companions, while "Witch Hunt" sees a Dalish warrior and a Circle mage join you (alongside Dog from the original game) on the quest to find Morrigan.

In Mass Effect 2, the late Commander Shepard is back in action but with a largely newly recruited crew, while his/her old crew is (mostly) unavailable. This is mostly reversed in Mass Effect 3, though, with only one new squad member (two with DLC), while the rest are familiar faces/voices.

Shadow Hearts keeps Yuri for sequel, but with brand new party since the previous heroine is dead and rest of party busy elsewhere with own lives. Some do reappear in the game though or are referenced.

Max Payne 3 stars the eponymous character in the lead role once more but the entire supporting cast from the first two games is replaced with new characters. This is likely due to the fact that most of them end up dead.

While Reimu and Marisa are constantly playable (Marisa only after the third game), this has happened twice in Touhou:

The first instance is during the switch from PC-98 to Windows. Many of the PC-98 characters are merely one-shots that are never heard of again after being defeated. However, Mima and Genjii are some of the exceptions, appearing prominently in almost all games. They are never heard of again after Mystic Square, the fifth game.

After Mountain of Faith, the tenth game, starts the Moriya Shrine Conspiracy arc, the characters from the sixth to ninth games have been getting a lot less appearances. Unlike the first case, though, the characters are explicitly shown to still exist, just not getting as much screentime.

Web Comic

Season 1 of Tower of God ends with everybody passing the test of the 2nd floor except for main character Baam, who got betrayed and pushed into the lake by Rachel and got assigned to be guided by Hwa Ryun. Season two begins with several new characters meeting a new, stronger and far more stoic Baam. The rest of the season 1 cast has since begun to be reintroduced into the story, at least the important ones... and Parakewl

My Little Pony: Equestria Girls, the movie spin-off of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, had Twilight and Spike enter the mirror to the human-world without their friends, but in the process make new friends out of the older ones' humanized counterparts. Technically, those humans are Twilight's friends, but at the same time they aren't, so it's likely debatable. As of the third movie, none of the characters from the show appear at all, though as usual, most of the cast consists of expies.

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